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“It all began with a poem,” Townshend begins simply. “I had been a recent inductee to the teachings of the Indian master Meher Baba and he led me to the poems of Hermann Hesse. I started to write about a young seeker. I made him a deaf, dumb and blind boy, because we are all deaf, dumb and blind until we discover our spiritual side.

“I called the story Amazing Journey,” he says, which is also the name of the pivotal song from the rock opera that would change Townshend’s life.

Together with Roger Daltry, John Entwistle and Keith Moon, he had founded a band called The Who in 1964, which had come to know enormous fame, but Townshend was astute enough to sense they were on a downward spiral.

“Everybody thought we were a hot band, but suddenly we stopped selling singles. I knew we couldn’t just keep going like we had been. I decided I would have one last bash, if you like, throw everything into the washing machine and see what we came up with.”

One of the band’s two managers at the time, Kit Lambert, was the son of Constant Lambert, the renowned British composer and conductor. He acted as midwife to the birth of Tommy.

“He was very posh, but also very worldly, was our Kit,” recalls Townshend. “He felt opera was there for the taking. It had been a snob fest, he said, that needed to be shaken up. He told me I should write a rock opera.

“He got me listening to everything: Wagner, Puccini, Mozart. But then he brought me to Benjamin Britten and I listened to Billy Budd. It’s been an influence on everything I’ve done ever since.

“Why? It’s about the sea and it’s about boats, but it’s also about a young man, a boy really, who is terribly abused. The abuse of the child. That’s what resonated so strongly with me.”

He talks about the topic in a broader sense at first but would bring it very close to home later.

“You have to understand what it was like for my generation, the one that came right after the Second World War (Townshend was born in 1945). In the immediate aftermath of the war, the value of the child had changed. I don’t think we were considered to be particularly important. We all felt disenfranchised. Our parents were worried about living under the shadow of the bomb and dealing with postwar austerity.”

Townshend took all those feelings, as well as the core of the spiritual search he had touched on in his poem and started writing.

“I had a real mentor in Kit. Without him, Tommy would have just been a rock album with a kind of story underneath. He helped me make it make sense.”

So Townshend sent his deaf, dumb and blind boy on an amazing journey where “he’d be the experiment for everyone’s darker side,” with images and characters he plucked from his subconscious: the nurturing yet destroying Acid Queen, the malevolent Cousin Kevin and, most significantly, the child-abusing Uncle Ernie.

“Ernie isn’t about specific sexual abuse, it’s about the threat of it, the inference if it, the fear of it,” begins Townshend.

“I actually asked John Entwistle to write that one, because I couldn’t deal with it. I’d had my own bad time with my grandmother. I had been eroticized at an early age and I’d had to learn to deal with.”

In his autobiography, Who I Am, he details about what happened to him when his parents sent him away at the age of 6 to live with his grandmother.

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“She wouldn’t let me have a lock on my door, which was terrifying. She had one guy that looked like Adolf Hitler, with a little moustache, his hair brushed to the side and a withered arm. He would sit me on his lap and I had to call him Uncle.”

Townshend still has trouble with those memories, although as he now says, “I found that this is something that is not unique to me. It’s a worldwide syndrome. And I couldn’t write about a purely spiritual journey. I had to deal with hideous social scars that touch all of us.”

Tommy had acquired its shape and its message, and Townshend began writing, but near the end of the process the story took one important twist.

The concept of Tommy being a “pinball wizard” and acquiring worldwide fame because of his skill at those flashing machines may seem integral to the work now, but it was added at the 11th hour.

Nik Cohn, then the rock critic for The Observer, heard an early mix of Tommy and had some reservations.

“It’s a bit po-faced, all this spiritualism,” Townshend recounts him saying of that version, in which Tommy became a rock star. “You need something to make it more fun.”

Cohn had been telling Townshend about “a tough little 16-year-old girl who was a pinball hustler,” and suddenly Townshend decided to make his hero “a pinball champion, gathering disciples and taking over the world.”

He wrote the now famous anthem, “Pinball Wizard” and “wrote all the other pinball references into the story sideways.”

“It worked. It made the whole story lighter, but it also made it more accessible and that allowed me to go deeper. Suddenly there was this sense that pinball was about the universe and an autistic, Asperger’s-afflicted, deaf, dumb and blind kid could be the key to it all.”

The work went on to worldwide success as an album, a concert piece, a Ken Russell film and a hit Broadway show.

But now, nearly 45 years later, what does it mean to Townshend?

“Sadly, not a lot has changed. There’s still a sense that the family is in trouble, that the way religion operates is still in trouble, that the celebrity system is still in trouble and that all of these things . . . well, they’re all the same.

“There’s a poignancy to that. I think about my generation and think that it’s sad that things were as they were.”

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